Pain
by EoEDaD
Summary: She had never read of a pain like this, had never heard tales of this kind of betrayal. But, then, when had anything about her life ever been normal? RavenMalchior, oneshot.


**A/N:** Yes, yes, I know I'm supposed to be working on Black Flame. But it's just not cooperating, and I needed to write something new.

Oddly enough, I think this is my first RaeMal. Starts off semi-sad, ends fluffy (or at least, to quote Zoi, "cute"). This is dedicated to Zoicytes-Shadow for being so nice and reviewing every single chapter of Black Flame, even when there was no conceivable reason to do so, because I had already said that I was going to finish it by the end of the week.

I don't own the Teen Titans or Shakespeare. (Though that would be very, very cool. I could get to kill Romeo before he even met Juliet!)

* * *

**Pain**

Was it supposed to hurt like this?

Raven had read of epic romances, of tragic endings, of heartbreak and betrayal. She had scoffed at tales of lovers who died from unrequited love, and nearly laughed aloud at portrayals of deathbed confessions of ardor. Despite her utter hatred for anything even remotely romantic, she could probably list every cliché ever written in the history of love stories.

And yet, this—_this_—was so thoroughly unlike anything that she had ever read of. She did not feel as though her heart had been ripped from her breast: no, it was still there, and every beat reminded her—not of his false love, but of his betrayal, and how nearly that betrayal had come to ending the beating of her heart entirely. She threw herself into fights with a disregard for her own safety that made even Robin pause and had nearly caused Starfire to have a nervous breakdown on more than one occasion.

Her friends worried about her, she knew, but said nothing, and for that she was grateful. Beast Boy's improvised speech had touched her, true, but that kind of maturity from him was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and she knew better than to hope that it would happen again.

Raven didn't talk to her friends for the same reason that she could find no hint of what she was expressing in any book: _no one would be able to understand_.

It was not that she was arrogant enough or self-centered enough to believe that she was the only girl (using the term loosely) to ever be taken in by a false promise. She had probably not even been as attached to her liar as the others had been to theirs. Love at first sight—or week of conversation—was not exactly in her nature.

Yet, had any of the other been an empath? Had any of them, at the moment of betrayal, _known_ in the deepest part of their soul exactly why they were being betrayed?

Raven smiled bitterly. She had so much to thank her father for, did she not? It would be infinitely easier if she could hate him, despise him for what he did to her. She _should_ hate him—he had lied to her, ripped her heart to shreds!

But... she knew why. Raven's smile gave way to equally bitter laughter. There was too much irony to go unappreciated. The entire basis of Malchior's seduction had been that _he was like her_. He understood her; he didn't think she was creepy, but merely—what had he said? Misunderstood? No, no, she was not misunderstood: the others knew her far better than she knew herself, in truth. She had been wrong to attempt to ignore the dark side of her heritage, but it would be far worse to give it unrestrained control of who she was.

She had believed that he loved her, while he was trapped: you can't sense the emotions of a magical paper construct, and he had been a magnificent actor. But when he had—no, she would not lie to herself, when _she_ had released him, of her own free will, she had realized exactly what he was, and it had disturbed her beyond all belief.

Malchior was like her, in ways she had never dreamt of. Both of them were a living personification of the eternal struggle between light and darkness, a struggle that is waged daily in the souls of every sentient creature on this earth, but they had fallen on opposite sides of the divide. They were so close to the line, both of them, so close that it was nearly impossible to tell the difference—but it was there, and it could not be denied.

Raven rolled over in her bed and stared up at the unseen ceiling of her darkened room. Maybe that was the root of the insomnia that had plagued her. When she had left Azarath, she had been so close to becoming like him—a being of pure malice, unadulterated destruction.

She had chosen not to, and (Beast Boy-inspired temper tantrums aside) she had not thought that anything could shake her decision. He had nearly done it, though—Azar! He had all _but_ done it, in truth: a few honeyed words, and she had accepted dark magic, learned it, _used_ it on an innocent little child. She did not know if she would ever be able to forgive herself for that.

Raven, giving up on going to sleep anytime soon, sat up and looked at the locked trunk sitting at the foot of her bed. "Love is merely a madness, and deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do," she murmured softly, unable to remember which book in her scriptorium of a room she had read the line in. **(1)**_There, but for the grace of the gods, I go._ Even now, almost a year after the fact, she still didn't like to think about how little it would have taken for him to convince her to be truly evil—to go beyond the innate darkness that she had no control over, to release her rage on the world, even allow her father entry into this plane and watch as he killed all that she had ever cared about.

Worse still was the unacknowledged fear in her heart: could it happen again? Was she so easy to read, so quick to bend to an attractive man's will, that another could play her the same way? There was no way for her to know if, even after everything, she could still fall...

Raven paused in her reflections as an utterly insane, outlandish thought flashed across her mind. It would be suicide, she must be mad to even consider such a thing—

She groaned. This could not end well.

Dragging herself out of bed, Raven hissed softly as her bare feet made contact with the cold ground. The surprise made her pause, and she began to question her actions. Surely there must be an easier way—deliberately letting herself fall for Aqualad? No, she was already pretty sure that he thought of her as more than a friend, and it wouldn't be fair to toy with him that way.

Well, then. Seeing as how Raven had only ever been attracted to two people in her lifetime (which couldn't be normal, now that she thought about it), that pretty much ruled out any alternatives.

"Damn you, Malchior," she muttered as she knelt in front of a wooden chest at the foot of her bed. Carefully, she raised the lid, feeling the restraining wards she had placed on it flowing over her in an almost tangible wave of magic. She might have gone just a _wee_ bit overboard when she sealed him away, but then, she hadn't expected that she would ever be foolish enough to actually open the cursed thing again.

The white book sitting at the bottom of the box certainly didn't _look_ like it contained a malevolent entity that would kill everything it laid eyes on, given half a chance. Actually, it didn't look like it contained anything more than words and paper.

The pages rustled as she picked it up, and she nearly dropped it.

"Raven?" A voice issued from between the pages, and Raven wondered when he had developed the ability to speak without the book actually being open. Funny, he hadn't spoken to her at all—or maybe she just hadn't been able to hear him through the locked and thrice-sealed trunk.

"Dearest Raven, what…"

"Shut up." Raven's voice was completely bereft of any sort of emotion, and it seemed to take Malchior aback.

"Huh?"

Raven had never heard him sound quite so… uncultured, and she took a sort of sadistic pleasure in being able to reduce him to colloquialisms. "Shut up."

A long string of spluttered incoherencies followed (though Raven was quite certain that she heard mention of an insect and her father's family), and she added condescendingly, "That means to stop talking, in case you're unaware of present-day expressions."

Stunned silence.

"Oh, and my paternal family is largely demons, though I think there may have been a few undead that married into the clan, so there's no real point to insulting them. And, given _your_ family, I don't think that you should really be insulting anyone else's."

Malchior found his voice and roared, "WHAT?"

Raven almost grinned. This kind of dialogue was very unlike her, but she had always felt more capable of talking to Malchior than to any other person she had met. And, anyways, she had wanted to see if the legends about dragons having an overweening sense of familial pride were true. Apparently, they were.

"Your mother was Quarente, correct? The dragoness that was killed by an unarmed, half-witted _teenager?_ Who wasn't even _magical?_" She had always been interested in the lore of mythic beings, and it wasn't hard to trace any one dragon's specific heritage, given the proper motivation.

"… It was a lucky shot."

"And then there's Llowen." No further words were necessary.

"HEY! How could he have known what the traders were carrying with them?"

"He tried to attack an entire caravan of dragonsbane. That's… truly sad."

Their conversation (if an unending duel of words could really be given such a civil-sounding appellation) continued into the night, ending only when Raven was cut off in the middle of a sentence by a massive yawn. She did not bid Malchior a good night, nor did he her: she simply grabbed the book, chucked it in a rather undignified fashion into the chest, and shut the lid on the way to her bed.

They continued in this vein for several weeks, Raven steadfastly refusing to address the dragon with anything other than complete and disdainful indifference but unable to resist the twisted allure that their arguments held (though perhaps "arguments" was the wrong word as well, since he was the only one who ever displayed any emotion). She was forced to tell herself several times a day that this was simply to prove that she _could_ resist him, and he had started to make it difficult.

"My dear, much as it displeases me to disagree with you…"

"Such a shame that your beauty is not matched by your wit…"

"Enchanting as ever, even when you are obviously mistaken…"

"Raven, why are you so… cold?"

She could take the compliments, the effusive flattery that was so exaggerated it was easy to dismiss. But the last… they had been debating an archaic point of Greek mythology (whether Zeus truly feared Nyx, or simply didn't feel like pursuing his revenge after Hypnos fled to her), and—seemingly out of thin air—Malchior had asked her. She changed color, ignored him entirely, and retired early that evening.

By the next day, she had come to the conclusion that this entire idea was getting far too dangerous and resolved to seal the thing away for good. There were spells that would make the chest impenetrable, even to the caster, though they would be a massive headache if you changed your mind, mainly because they were designed to preclude that very action. It was a good plan, so far as plans went, and it might even have worked, if the Titans hadn't been called to face Dr. Light that same day.

When Raven got back to her bed, it was well after midnight, and every inch of her body was bruised and aching. The criminal had managed to procure a new weapon, and not only had she been forced to pretty much take down the idiot single-handedly, but the Titan's medical bay simply was not equipped to deal with wounds inflicted by rays of pure, concentrated light. She'd had just enough power left to heal most of the major damage, but the sheer effort had left her barely able to stand.

She flopped down on the covers, closing her eyes and feeling a new, intense appreciation for the straightforward luxury that was a mattress and sheets.

"Raven? What—what _happened?_"

The half-demon cracked a single eyelid. Malchior's book was sitting at the foot of her bed, and she mentally hit herself for forgetting about it when the alarm had gone off. "Dr. Light," she said tiredly, far too worn out to even think about their usual sparring routine. "Dr. Light and the rough equivalent of a luxspicula spell."

"And I'm guessing that your _friends_ were entirely useless?" He pronounced "friends" as though it was below him to even be using such a word.

She simply didn't have the energy for this. "Later," she muttered, her eyelids already drooping. "So… tired…"

Malchior didn't take the hint. "Wait… you said a _luxspicula_ spell? But… you're Trigon's daughter?"

All he got in response was an incoherent mumble, but it was something along the lines of an affirmative.

To an already half-asleep Raven, the resulting explosion sounded like a sonic boom. "WAKE UP! WAKE UP, YOU STUPID GIRL!"

She bolted upright. "What?!" she demanded angrily.

He sighed exaggeratedly, having seemingly calmed down once he realized that she was awake. "I don't suppose you remembered to wash yourself off before you came in here?"

"I… oh, _damn_." Raven bolted into the bathroom, all traces of drowsiness gone. How could she have been so idiotic?

In her haste, she forgot to bring a spare set of clothes, and so she had to go back to her room dressed only in a towel after her shower.

"And I suppose you had to heal all of the idiots, too, so your lapse in memory is s—"

Malchior choked on whatever he was going to say. "I—you—what is _that?_"

Raven shrugged, forcing down the blush that was threatening to rise in her cheeks. "I was in a hurry."

"Just—just put on… something. Anything. But not—but less revealing than that." Raven was surprised by the note of pleading in his voice. She wasn't _that_ horrible to look at, was she?

When she had changed, she sat on the corner of her bed, feeling silence envelop the two as she looked at the book. "Do you know why I let you out?"

"No. I didn't want to."

"I wanted to prove to myself that I wouldn't fall for you again." The words were spoken almost coldly.

A pause, and she would have sworn that he sounded hurt when he said, "And you succeeded, quite obviously."

She didn't reply.

"What now?" He seemed strangely indifferent to his own fate, and it made Raven wonder exactly what he was thinking.

"You saved me."

"So… you're not going to kill me. Out of… _gratitude?_" The idea seemed repugnant to him. She would have thought that he would be happy to save his own skin, no matter why it was done.

"No. But I don't trust you."

"Again, I'll ask. What now?"

Raven hesitated for a moment, wondering if she even had the strength and concentration to perform a spell as difficult as the one she was thinking of. But, really, she had no choice—it would be massively unfair for her to ignore the fact that he had saved her.

(Though, now that she thought about it, he probably got something out of that, too. No—if she had died and he was anywhere near the body, her friends would have tried to destroy the book, and most likely released him in the process. Annihilating containment wards could be tricky.)

Raven moaned and dragged herself out of bed, swaying as she walked over to the many shelves lining her room. Suddenly picking up an old, fragile roll of paper, Raven placed it in front of Malchior's prison.

She could practically see his jaw drop. "You… you have the scrolls of—" He stopped before he said the name.

"Mammon."

The book itself seemed to recoil when she said the devil's name. "I—you—how in the name of hell itself did you get _that?_"

"Long story."

"You have the gods-cursed _scrolls of Mammon_ and you won't tell me how you got them?"

"I did him a… favor, of sorts. At the time, I just thought of it as a way to get on Father's nerves."

She could practically hear the gears in Malchior's mind turning. "And you were impressed with the Mornal Archives? Why, Raven, in that book…"

A slow, feral smile spread across Raven's face, transforming it in a way that was even more terrifying than her four-eyed demon aspect. He was starting to get it. "Yes?" she asked, her voice pure sugar and capable of making any sane man run screaming from the room.

"Uh… you know, you never really approved of dark magic, right? So, um, you're not going to use anything in there on, well, _me_, or that would be… compromising your values."

"That's funny. You talking about values." Raven started leafing through sheets of—not paper, but it was probably better to just call it that and not think too closely about what they actually _were_. She was obviously looking for something.

"Raven!" Malchior's voice was amusingly high-pitched. "What are you doing?" He was right to be worried, of course: some of the illustrations she was going through were quite… intriguing. Beast Boy's latest prank came to mind. Perhaps she could tone them down a bit. Or, on second thought, she could leave them as they were. He really had become quite annoying recently.

"Looking."

Malchior gulped audibly. "You know, I don't think I've ever apologized properly—"

Raven found the spell she had been looking for. She glanced at the page, surprised by its simplicity.

"Guransk Herqim… Thraskne?" she said hesitantly, cutting off Malchior without a second thought and feeling the syllables burn as they left her mouth, leaving a bitter residue behind them, like ashes and the metallic tang of blood.

There was no blinding flash of light, no blast of wind, the way there had been when she summoned him the first time. There was an explosion, of sorts, but it was far subtler, undetectable to anyone who had not spent their entire life dealing with magic: it was the indefinably not-right feel of the universe rearranging itself, shifting itself to create matter where there was none. Dealing with the laws of nature was tricky, and something that could be considered dark magic in and of itself.

Raven gritted her teeth, trying to control the tidal wave of power that was surging through her body. Demon-created spells usually too for granted that the caster had almost unlimited strength. She supposed she should just be grateful that the power was being drawn from an outside source—if it had been her own supply of magic that was fuelling this, she would have been dead twenty times over.

The fabric of space was still trembling when Raven drew a shaky breath, her vision spinning and her legs weak from the aftershocks of the surge.

She blinked, and there was a boy about her own age sitting in front of her, with black hair and strangely multicolored eyes.

He looked down at himself, and then at her.

"I'm not dead," he said, stating the obvious. He sounded surprised.

"No. But you're not a dragon anymore, either."

Something that looked like pain flickered in his eyes, but it was gone before she could look too closely. "I suppose I have earned your distrust," he said evenly. Raven could sense the self-loathing that was rolling off of him in waves despite his appearance, though, and bit her lip.

"I trust you with—with _my_ life," she explained carefully, trying to make him understand the cause of her actions. "But it would be unfair—selfish—of me to risk the lives of the others. I—couldn't do that." She added in an attempt at consolation, "Your physical strength should still be impressive."

Malchior laughed bitterly. "What? Trying to soften the blow? I told you, I know what I've done."

He continued, more softly, "And of course you can't trust me, with your life or anyone else's. I can learn to live with that, I suppose…"

Raven, meanwhile, glared at him, having been growing steadily more irritated as he continued his in his self-pitying reflections. "Or you could listen to me," she suggested dryly, deliberately ignoring the implications of what he had just said.

Malchior blinked. "Huh?" He seemed to have forgotten that she was there.

Okay, not believing her was one thing. But ignoring her completely? Raven enjoyed staying in the shadows normally, but absolutely nothing about this situation was normal.

Her eyes started to glow as she walked up to him, in her fury deliberately infusing a predatory grace to her step that made Malchior's eyes grow big and round. "If I say something, I mean it," she stated, leaning in until she was bare inches from his face and feeling perversely gleeful at the way he simultaneously flinched and blushed. "I. Trust. You."

"But—"

She grabbed his head and pulled it down to meet hers, feeling immensely lucky that their lips actually connected—she didn't feel like being humiliated, and she didn't have much experience with this sort of thing. As a matter of fact, if she hadn't been quite so furious with the obstinate dragon, it is highly unlikely that such an action would have occurred to her in the first place.

There were no fireworks (unless you count a lightbulb that had popped from the force of Raven's irritation), and the kiss was over almost as soon as it began. Malchior seemed incapable of doing anything more than staring, dumbfounded, as Raven pulled back, the slightest tinge of color in her cheeks. "I—you—"

"Is _that_ clear enough for you?" Her voice was waspish, her eyes just daring him to say something out of line.

A slow grin spread across his face. "If I say no, do I get to kiss you again?"

"No, you get thrown through the wall." To prove her point, she levitated him a few feet off of the ground.

He winced as she none-too-gently put him back down. "Ah. Well, then…"

She arched an eyebrow, wondering what he was getting at.

"You mentioned something about my strength?"

"Yes…"

"So, shouldn't I meet these friends of yours? I mean, since you obviously can't bear to be separated from me—"

Her glare promised him eons of pain, and he amended hurriedly, "—erm, that is, since I'll probably need help adjusting to this world—"

"Better."

"—I'll need you to help me, and that would involve staying here, right?"

Raven nodded slowly. "Yes… but you're explaining your history to them, not me."

Malchior's eyes bulged to comic proportions. "I—no—they'll kill me!"

She shrugged. "So?"

His glare was nowhere near as intimidating as hers. When she didn't back down (quite the contrary: she seemed to find his attempts at coercion amusing), he gave in with a mumbled "I hate you."

A rare, infuriatingly smug smile spread over her face before she pulled up her hood. "Coming?"

He grinned back at her, a crazed thought entering his mind. "Sure." He walked up beside her, and then reached out and grabbed her hand. "Now, let's go."

She seemed to have frozen at his touch, but then sighed and accepted it.

They left her room hand-in-hand.

* * *

**(1) **from Shakepeare's play _As You Like It, _Act 3, Scene II. I love that line.

I've written a love story... with a happy ending. Even if Raven is a bit (or more than a bit, but my logic was that she would be more open and relaxed around Malchior, even if she "hated" him) OOC, that's just... scary. The Apocalypse is coming! Ahem... never mind.


End file.
